Likelihood to Recommend

Adaptive Insights

It is well suited for mid-size companies to have a budgeting, forecasting, and reporting platform. The system needs data and someone to maintain it so it would not be well suited for a small company or one without a dedicated finance team.

Direct links to 3rd-party data sources

REST API

Adaptive Insights

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Power BI For Office 365

6.0

Pros

Adaptive Insights has so many good resources and easy filtering capabilities with active searching. When you go to a section of Adaptive Insights, you will see filters at the top of the page. As you change them, the contents of the page change to suit what you're looking for. This makes it easy to find the resources you need!

As previously mentioned, the FP&A Glossary is a great feature due to its concise definition of many common terms in FP&A.

I have not had much experience with the eBooks section of Adaptive Insights, but there are is a wide variety of topics to explore, such as rolling forecasts, and best practices for controllers.

Cons

On the Infographics page, I would love to see a thumbnail of the infographic before clicking on it. In general, I love that when you hover over a box, you get a more detailed description, but I would also love the ability to hover and then click to see a thumbnail before opening the full page.

Similarly, I think the Videos page should have the length of each video somewhere on the squares. This would help people judge how much time they would need to watch each one all the way through, and be able to make an informed decision about how many they could watch in between meetings.

If I were a small business owner, I would likely use Power BI for Office 365 for the sheer fact that I would get the Office licensing I need, along with powerful capabilities. As a Microsoft Partner, we continue to see Microsoft invest heavily in the Power BI capabilities, and will continue to implement and support BI solutions around this product, as we believe this is in the best interest of our clients.

Support

Adaptive Insights6.8

Based on 11 answers

Support requests are always handled promptly and resolved favourably.Many user support requests arise during initial deployment and use and often represent questions relating to best methods or how to approach their particular situation, which we gladly assist with as we provide the appropriate skills transfer training and assistance.As clients become more knowledgeable in working with the product suite then they tend not to ask many questions.

Online Training

Adaptive Insights8.2

Based on 6 answers

Training receives the highest rating due to the availability of Webex training from an expert at Adaptive, with several sessions tailored to specific features including personnel, capital, formulas, reporting, etc

Implementation

Adaptive Insights8.2

Based on 13 answers

In our experience the Adaptive Suite is quick and easy to deploy. Most implementations are facilitated in just a few weeks but may range depending on organisation complexity from say 2 to 12 weeks with only the very largest and most complex taking a little longer. When key stakeholders are properly engaged and the opportunities for skills transfer are exercised, we find that implementations proceed well and are delivered on time and to project budget

Alternatives Considered

Other than Excel, we did not look at other systems. Key for us was also a bridge or link to our current ERP system, Intacct. I also researched retention of customers with Adaptive. I could not find any vendors who left Adaptive. Strong retention.

When you look at the whole MS BI stack, it is far and away the best solution. But if you are solely looking at PowerBI.com (Power BI for Office 365), it's features are limited to creating graphs and visualizations. For example, you create cubes and data models in Cognos, but you need SSAS to do this before sending the finished model to PowerBI.com.

Return on Investment

The most positive impact has been on time. While it took some time to get things set up correctly, once we did, we were able to report results very quickly.

The budgeting process has gone much more quickly.

What-if scenarios are a little trickier. There are multiple ways you can do it. We have chosen to use assumptions for percentages and then copy the original version to a "what-if" version and change the assumption it is pointing to. However, this is a bit clunky.

Month-end reporting is getting faster and faster the more we automate through Adaptive.

As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.

One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.